Re: "Famous psychic returns" (April 25)

While interviewing me for this article, when the writer asked if I thought Noreen Renier was a "charlatan," I explained that I don't make such accusations, and said nothing "nasty" at all about her.

Noreen's reported reason for declining to be tested by Tampa Bay Skeptics conflicts with what she told us at the time. She had telephoned me on March 15, 1990, for two reasons: to thank me for my "fairness" in printing her recent letter in the TBS newsletter, and to decline our testing offer not because 'someone warned her that the group meant to trick her' but because, in her own words, she was "working on too many police cases and with too many scientists to have the time" (verbatim from my contemporaneous notes).

As for her suggestion that I "do something nice for mankind," in addition to having practiced medicine for 15 years I have spent countless hours educating the public about the folly of accepting supernatural claims at face value.

--Gary P. Posner, M.D.
  Tampa, Florida